If Robert Noyce had been alive today, he’d be celebrating his 84th birthday. The fact he is the focus of today’s Google Doodle suggests Noyce is rather an important figure too, and everyone is indebted to him, unless of course you hate computers.

Robert Noyce was the co-founder of Intel and half of the pairing that invented the integrated circuit. Unfortunately his life was cut short in 1990 at the age of 62 after suffering a heart attack and later dying in hospital.

When Noyce founded Intel in 1968 he was seen as the visionary alongside the technical expertise of Gordon E. Moore. Before then he had studied at MIT, been a research engineer, and co-founded the transistor and integrated circuit manufacturer Fairchild Semiconductor. But it wasn’t just his vision and technical skill that helped make Intel the company it is today, it was his management style.

We see it as a standard practice today in the large tech companies, but Noyce was one of the first to treat employees as equals, offering rewards, promoting open team work, and rejecting the extras that were typical of his management position (private jets, expensive cars, and extravagant office furnishings). It’s a style that allowed talented individuals to create while remaining committed to the company. Intel’s success and the status it enjoys today is tribute to how well it worked and continues to work.

As well as helping to establish Intel as a leading chip company and overseeing the design of the microprocessor, he has a number of awards to his name. U.S. Patent 2,981,877 entitled Semiconductor Device and Lead Structure carries his name (one of 15 awarded to him), and he holds the National Medal of Technology, the Franklin Institute’s Stuart Ballantine Medal, the IEEE medal of Honor, the National Medal of Science, and was inducted into the U.S. Business Hall of Fame.

Without Robert Noyce, the so-called “Mayor of Silicon Valley,” the chip industry would probably be a very different place today. But even with him gone, he continues to have an influence through The Noyce Foundation, which helps to improve the teaching of math, science, and literacy to young people.